It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself at last remembering on what current of association he had been floated so far.Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for him, and he had duly recalled its having been with this scene of rather ominous legend that, like so many young men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had begun.He was now quite out of it, with his "home," as Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes; which was perhaps why, repairing, not to fail of justice either, to the elder neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element of the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation.He was not at least in danger of seeing the youth and the particular Person flaunt by together; and yet he was in the very air of which--just to feel what the early natural note must have been--he wished most to take counsel.It became at once vivid to him that he had originally had, for a few days, an almost envious vision of the boy's romantic privilege.Melancholy Murger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home, in the company of the tattered, one--if he not in his single self two or three--of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy and the real thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve.This was the region--Chad had been quite distinct about it--in which the best French, and many other things, were to be learned at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever fellows, compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully pleasant set.The clever fellows, the friendly countrymen were mainly young painters, sculptors, architects, medical students; but they were, Chad sagely opined, a much more profitable lot to be with--even on the footing of not being quite one of them--than the "terrible toughs" (Strether remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks roundabout the Opera.Chad had thrown out, in the communications following this one--for at that time he did once in a while communicate--that several members of a band of earnest workers under one of the great artists had taken him right in, ****** him dine every night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even pressing him not to neglect the hypothesis of there being as much "in him" as in any of them.There had been literally a moment at which it appeared there might be something in him; there had been at any rate a moment at which he had written that he didn't know but what a month or two more might see him enrolled in some atelier.The season had been one at which Mrs.Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on them all as a blessing that their absentee HAD perhaps a conscience--that he was sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of variety.The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.
But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the curtain.The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve--his effective little use of the name of which, like his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but one of the notes of his rough cunning.The light refreshment of these vain appearances had not accordingly carried any of them very far.On the other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given him a chance, unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for initiations more direct and more deep.It was Strether's belief that he had been comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the first effects of the migration would not have been, without some particular bad accident, to have been deplored.There had been three months--he had sufficiently figured it out--in which Chad had wanted to try.He HAD tried, though not very hard--he had had his little hour of good faith.The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any accident attestedly bad enough was stronger.Such had at any rate markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of impressions.
They had proved, successively, these impressions--all of Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger evolution of the type--irresistibly sharp: he had "taken up," by what was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly mentioned, with one ferociously "interested" little person after another.Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description of the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in Spain; and he had been led to apply it in thought to Chad's number one, number two, number three.Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat--they had all morally wounded, the last had morally killed.The last had been longest in possession--in possession, that is, of whatever was left of the poor boy's finer mortality.And it hadn't been she, it had been one of her early predecessors, who had determined the second migration, the expensive return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed, of the vaunted best French for some special variety of the worst.